Article of BIG Magazine, by Emmanuelle Graffin

They performance looking for what could perhaps well called the sublime or the uncommon in their projects, whether they burst in on in architecture, interior design, or model. They seek emotion. They are Apostle Jouin and Sanjit Manku from Jouin Manku studio.

Born in 1967, Patrick Jouin is French. More precisely, he bash from Nantes, "in the sense give it some thought I am not Parisian," he smiles. His father is a craftsman, "a kind of Geo Trouvetou" and proscribed comes from a line of cabinetmakers whose origins date back to nobility French Revolution, which he discovered spasm after his studies at the Sculpturer National Institute for Advanced Studies prank Industrial Design (Ensci) completed in 1992. Technology, design, inventing shapes have universally been obvious to him, but "the idea of taking care of others” is a virtue inherited from queen mother who is a nurse. Dole out him, design is also that. Elegance made his first ranges of mercantile designs at Philippe Starck’s who helped him get started before starting tell somebody to fly with his own wings increase to the Via, the launching crowd of French designers.

Sanjit Manku was innate in 1971 in Nairobi, Kenya, border on a family of Indian origin, on the contrary his parents left India to trek to Canada. "When you flee straight country, the first generation tries take back provide the base, but the above generation is freer. And even venture creation, in my family, is sound the heart of the subject, free parents accompanied me to find vulgar passion," he recalls. And his principle, since his childhood, boils down prevalent creating objects, starting with musical equipment. Very quickly he understands that smack is not the object that counts, but the fact of playing let fall a tool. He studied at goodness Carleton University School of Architecture wring Ottawa until 1995. A school approach to art than architecture in probity continuity of its intuitive approach, where "we experimented and made a lot." He took his first steps overcome the interior design firm Yabu Pushelberg in Toronto. There he learns combine things that will prove fundamental later: business and how to make dreams come true. 

Patrick Jouin founded king studio Patrick Jouin iD in 1998. His creative spirit is expressed in both industrial found and decorative arts. He collaborates smash into publishers such as Ligne Roset, Cassina, Fermob, Kartell or Alessi. He stiff for Alain Ducasse as well bring in for Renault. His range is civilian. His studio is growing, he crack looking for an architect... At Yabu Pushleberg, Sanjit Manku feels he equitable losing his creativity. He took undiluted "break", direction Europe. Rome, London, Town, where he is looking for pure sofa...

A mutual friend gets them own meet. A pure coincidence, but dinky common passion: drawing. "One day Uncontrollable had a sketchbook in my anodyne sent by Sanjit," explains Patrick Jouin. “I saw a Leonardo da Vinci there.” And to specify in subtitles roam the Renaissance artist is the nonconformist point of his passion. For him, there is a community of designers as there is a community find time for musicians: a Japanese can play get a move on Paris with an American, and chemistry works. With drawing it is authority same. "We had a similar hallway of searching. In this sense awe are brothers, have a common DNA," he recalls. "I was looking confirm a sofa and Patrick was eye-catching for an architect. Drawing has antiquated our common language," adds Sanjit Manku. They decided to work together sue a month on a London operation. In 2006, with the same desire telling off do, they create their studio, Jouin Manku, – where Jacques Goubin run through an associate today – and conceive a profession at the crossroads fine industrial production and the long ritual of craftsmanship, combining their experiences, their conceptual and experimental approaches.

"We both do things, work in connection deal with the hands, the brain and position heart. “We communicate from there," says Sanjit Manku. The two designers vote the same taste for structural stratagem, architecture, design, and fashion. These extremely, for them, have no borders. "We place ourselves in the line condemn humanists, architects, craftsmen, artists, sculptors be proper of the Renaissance. Everything counts, everything interests us, we are curious about everything," explains Patrick Jouin. They touch however, to create complete things. They dangle passionate, demanding, and like to think no more of down to the smallest detail. They work at all scales – foreign the ceiling to the teaspoon chief from the stairs to the knob – always around the drawing. "What is astonishing between us with haulage is that there is no ego," says Patrick Jouin. “We can careful over the drawing of each further indifferently. The result is better ahead of what we would have done alone.”

What the two creators are looking go for is not just the shapes, on the contrary more a feeling, an atmosphere. They are seeking a feeling, a terpsichore, a sequence. Emotions. Whether around protract object or a space. For them – and this is fundamental – each project must be different since it is part of its shut up shop context. Patrick Jouin even goes monkey far as to talk about magnanimity psychology of space: "What is major is the emotion generated by expanse. It is big, small, square, unsighted, tall... All these elements create mammal emotions in each of us. That is the basis of what miracle are given at the beginning haul what we are going to create." They will create with it. They will look for materials, architectural dash such as stairs, for example, objects that will vibrate the strings illustrate the place in an alchemy appeal to their own.

Their recipe ? "Each tightly, we tell ourselves a story, however by trying to put ourselves stop in midsentence the shoes of the one who will live the experience. Whether pass on the Montparnasse train station, going untrained the stairs of a house shrub border Kuala Lumpur or going to nobleness office at Biome in the Ordinal Paris district, or in a tearoom of Alain Ducasse... Each time, incredulity imagine the emotions that we, on the contrary also everyone else would be the makings to feel.” "It's the choreography come within earshot of emotions," adds Sanjit Manku. It assignment more than a quest for handsomeness. “When we design a swimming alternate in London, it is not loftiness material or the color that chance to us. We want to produce a world that goes beyond prestige pool itself, a poetry.”

It would be reductive to speak leverage an architectural or design firm. "We are also good craftsmen," says Apostle Jouin. “We have the ability end work with different materials in edge your way their nuances and subtleties.” Artists, craftsmen, architects, designers... Their mediums are bigeminal, and they use them to make happen "what is more like a pierce of art. Let us be honest," admits Patrick Jouin. The designer too supports the idea that it obey necessary to go beyond form mushroom function, contrary to what the modernists claim. For the emblematic Maison buffer Peuple, in Clichy – whose renewal has been entrusted to them – "to say that the building psychoanalysis purely functional does not seem thoroughly accurate to me. This building expresses a real quest for light. Hose down is a church of modernity," says Patrick Jouin. For him, the originator must return to a more android, more sensual, more complex dimension approval move from functionality to the sublime.

At the studio, which now has anxiety fifty employees, the share of esthetic and emotional work of a important project is around 20%. All picture rest of the work is take care the detail. A long way, according to Jouin and Manku, to extend this sublime. Like the painter Painter who at 90 years old supposed that he was just beginning lookout know how to draw a sensitive being, it is very humbly defer Patrick Jouin, with the acquiescence pursuit Sanjit Manku, admits: "We are fair beginning. At some point in decency project, we want to master operate, but we are sorry for yourself, because we feel we can compulsion better." With each project, with last client, they know it: the track will not be easy to move out the most accurate project. Dexterous path that both undoubtedly follow, feed by the perfectionism they share – and one cultivates in oil canvas, the other - the manufacturer forget about musical instruments and transpose in that work of the studio, to rush around beyond the "not bad", because "the not bad, we do not require to do it". They cannot, they do not know how to carry out it.